Tag: It's Worth It

Taking Care of Yourself – Not an Option by Kitty Bucholtz

I’ve been a full-time grad school student for the last eight months. It’s been wonderful and exhausting. I’ve loved school since kindergarten and I’ve been looking forward to grad school for nearly a decade. The process of getting accepted and enrolled happened in a whirlwind and I didn’t have any time to plan for it. I started school in March (the autumn semester here in Australia) and hadn’t even finished my U.S. taxes, so I started out behind already in terms of time.

And nothing really changed.

I stayed barely one step ahead of the slashing scythe of time the whole year. With three weeks left to go and three more assignments due – and Australian taxes due by the weekend! – I can tell you some things I’ve learned. I hope they help you prepare for NaNo or your next writing push.

Sleep

Know yourself. Do you need 6-7 hours a night? Then don’t go below 6. I am a happy camper with 8 1/2 hours plus time to lie in bed before I get up. (I like to talk to God about my day and mentally map it out.) So I try not to get less than 7, and I don’t get less than 6 hours two nights in a row. When I know I’m going to have a timing issue with sleep, I try to plan around it. On nights I’m out late for class or a meeting, I try to make sure the next morning is not a running morning. (On running days I get up at least an hour earlier.)

Know how you sleep and what helps you sleep better or worse. I’ve found I don’t sleep well if I’ve eaten in the last couple hours before bed. If I drink too much liquid in the last 4-6 hours of the day, I will often wake up and then rarely sleep well again after the bathroom break. (I now try to drink my many glasses of water from the time I wake up until about 3pm. I’m a big water drinker, but it’s bad for sleeping well.) The stress of school hasn’t helped either. A nutritionist at the local pharmacy suggested some natural herbal sleep aids. They’ve done wonders!

Exercise

I used to hate exercising. I don’t know why. I really don’t know why I’ve come to love running! 🙂 But here is a very real example for you. John and I ran a half marathon in September. We wanted a few days break from our running schedule, so we took it. Company came and we got lazy for another 10 days. Then it seemed to rain every morning that we planned to run. Before we knew it, a month had passed before we went out again. It was no surprise that we did terribly those first few days. What was a surprise was how much better I felt within a day or two after getting back into my regular running routine. I had more mental and physical energy to pour into my work.

If you exercise, keep at it. If you used to, but don’t do it anymore because you don’t have time, get back into it. If you hate the very word, do some floor exercises or at least stretches every day. This will help you stay strong while you spend time at your computer. And remember to stretch every 20-30 minutes. I set my kitchen timer this week and did a different stretch every 20 or so minutes. Each time took about 1 minute or less. Not that much time out of your day! I think you’ll see it has lasting positive effects.

Nutrition

This is my biggest weakness. (Have suggestions? Please share them!) The only thing I know for sure is that if I start the day with eggs or a protein shake, everything is better. I don’t have as many cravings and I find it somewhat easier to skip the sugary foods in my pantry. And I feel like I can concentrate better. But if I start with my favorite jaffa muffin from Brumby’s (an orange and chocolate chip muffin from my favorite bakery), I seem to crave sugars and breads all day.

When I asked the nutritionist about something to help me sleep, I told her about my life and stress and asked if she had any advice. She not only suggested the protein shake in the morning, or sprinkling the protein powder on healthy cereal, but she said I’d be better off keeping some fruits and nuts nearby for snacking. I’ve been eating prunes and dried apricots and almonds and peanuts for snacks lately. Again, big difference. Not only is it better for my body than sugary snacks and cookies, but my snack-craving fades after I’ve eaten a couple handfuls. Then I’m back to focusing on my work again. (One new favorite for breakfast or snacks – Special K with Chocolatey Flakes. Mmm.)

If you’re like me, and you work until you’re starving hungry and then have no self-control until you’ve put something in your stomach to ease the hunger pains – put a bag of your favorite dried fruit or nuts or whatever on your desk. Keep a package there – airtight so you don’t get bugs – and remind yourself to reach for it any time, guilt-free!

Rewards for NOT Doing It

We often talk about rewards as part of your writing routine. But it’s usually ways to reward yourself for your accomplishments. I’ve gotten into the habit lately of rewarding myself for what I’m not doing. If I don’t check email or do anything else in the morning, just sit down and do my work until lunch time, I reward myself with TV during lunch. My big weakness is doing other little things before the big thing that needs to be done in my day. (Lately, homework, but also putting writing first.) Then the big and most important thing doesn’t get completed until late in the day because I started it later than I should have/wanted to. (Or worse, it doesn’t get completed that day.)

When I go on my writer’s retreat this weekend, talking is going to be the biggest problem (and not just for me!). I have to think of something not-unhealthy to reward myself for not talking during our designated writing times. Giving myself cookies as a reward will only undermine my new goal for the summer to lose weight. 🙂 I’m still working on the rewards for changing my “bad” behaviors. Throw out some ideas if you have any. The idea is to sabotage your self-sabotaging behaviors.

One reward I decided on months ago was to do some teaching during the summer. I’ve been so busy with homework that I haven’t been able to do a lot of fun stuff lately. I’m excited to tell you that I’m teaching an online class in January – Going the Distance: Goal Setting and Time Management for the Writer. Look over the outline and sign up. We’ll start 2011 by creating better writing routines together!

Kitty Bucholtz is the co-founder of Routines for Writers, a web site dedicated to helping writers write more. She writes romance novels, light urban fantasy novels for adults and young adults, and magazine articles. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program at University of Technology, Sydney.

Planning for a Writing Push by Kitty Bucholtz

A Filter For Your Writing Well by Kitty Bucholtz

I had a bad week last month. I got a couple of my final school papers in the mail and I wasn’t pleased with my grades nor all the comments from my teachers. I thought I’d done a lot better than I had. (If you didn’t know, I’m getting my Master of Arts in Creative Writing degree at UTS in Sydney.) Like so many things in life, I didn’t fully understand what had so upset me until a few days after my mini-meltdown.

The shortest explanation is one a friend had to remind me of – the last year and a half has seen a lot of huge changes in my life. Regardless of the fact that I wanted most of those changes (moving around the world, going back to school), they still take a physical and emotional toll. Add in some short-term good things (company from America) and some short-term irritations (accountant needed more tax info from me that I had to find), and I found myself getting angry to one degree or another regularly, finally losing it when I received my school papers.

The reason I didn’t recognize what was happening is that it was all on the inside. I’d get mad about something, vent, and move on to the next thing. I’d get frustrated, take some deep breaths and push through. Then I’d get down about something (grades) and find myself unable to get up again. Because I was focused on trying to push through, to be strong and keep plugging along, I wasn’t paying attention to what was happening on the inside until I couldn’t get out of bed one day.

The day that happened I knew I had some serious thinking to do. It finally occurred to me that I was low-level angry at all kinds of things a lot of the time. In the stress of my first semester of grad school, I’d let my interior monitor get out of sync. By the end of the semester, I couldn’t even tell I was stressed about anything. But that morning in bed I realized I’d stopped making a conscious choice about how I wanted to react to the situations around me. I’d gotten into the habit of letting myself feel frustrated at every opportunity, at the world, at others, and at myself.

So for the last week, I’ve been practicing choosing not to be angry, frustrated, or depressed about things. It’s amazing how many opportunities there were for practice! But my interior monitor is getting re-synced. I’m getting better at reading myself again, and knowing when something needs to give, or change, or be left behind.

I was at a friend’s house who has a reverse-osmosis filter at her kitchen sink. She reminded me to fill my water glass using the filtered water rather than the regular tap water. The parallel between the water and my bad week was instantaneous. She needed a filter so that the water coming through her old pipes would not bring up all the rust and other deposits into the glass.

We need the same kind of filter when we are writing. We need something that purifies the water coming up out of our inner well. For many of us, that filter is the joy of writing. But that filter needs to be cleaned regularly or it stops working as well. I’m trying to shine up my joy-of-writing filter every time I sit down to write now. I picture myself writing happily on my book, and I let that image seep into me until I can feel myself smiling over how much I’ll enjoy it. Then I start writing.

Like with any other rejection, I gave myself 24-48 hours to get over the sting of those first semester grades. Then I went back to work on my book, knowing that I understand my target market and believing that I’m doing a good job even if my academic acquaintances only half-agree.

If you haven’t done so lately, take a minute and check your interior monitor. Do you need to take a break? Do you need a cleaner writing filter? Or is your writing well clean and full of fresh ideas? I think I’m going to try to add this to my monthly or quarterly routines.

Kitty Bucholtz is the co-founder of Routines for Writers, a web site dedicated to helping writers write more. She writes romance novels, light urban fantasy novels for adults and young adults, and magazine articles. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program at University of Technology, Sydney.

The Cost of Writing by Kitty Bucholtz

When I was in business school, I learned about opportunity cost. In general, if you have $20 and you want to see a movie, eat lunch out, and buy a new blouse, all the things you don’t do with the $20 is part of the cost of what you do choose to do. So if you buy a new blouse, it cost you $20 plus eating a sack lunch plus not seeing a movie this week. If you go to a movie and have lunch out, it cost you $20 plus foregoing movie snacks plus foregoing a sit-down lunch and eating fast food instead plus waiting to buy a new blouse.

When you choose what to do with your time, what you don’t do is the cost of what you chose to do. Every time I choose to watch an hour of TV with my husband, it costs me an hour of writing (or anything else I might have done with that hour). Conversely, every time I spend an hour writing or working in the evening, it costs me an hour with my husband. How many of us have gone to see a movie that we expected to be fun and came out complaining, “Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back again!” No matter what you do with your time, it’s time you won’t get back again. That might be what someone was thinking when they came up with the slogan, “Work hard, play hard.”

Instead of focusing on all the things we aren’t getting done (this is me, every day), we need to focus on what is the best use of our time now. In an hour, we might want to stop for a second and ask the question again. Perhaps again in four hours, or in another 30 minutes. If we can tap into a kind of moment-by-moment wisdom and allow ourselves to accept that we likely won’t accomplish everything we want to do – or perhaps even need to do – we can find greater peace and deeper joy in every moment, no matter what we’re doing.

Next week, I’m going to participate in a Book-in-a-Week challenge with my Sydney RWA group. To do that, it will cost me a great deal. I won’t be able to work on my taxes (the Australian tax year ends June 30); I won’t be able to clean my office; I won’t be able to do any but the most basic housecleaning; I won’t be able to hang out with friends, etc. But I’ve decided the cost is worth the benefit. I want to get my book out in August, and this is what it’s going to take.

The following week, one of the first things I’m going to do is clean my office. While this can be a procrastination technique, sometimes not doing it has too high a price. The time it took me to complete my U.S. taxes earlier this year was nearly double because I couldn’t find all my files after I moved. In the last ten months that we’ve been in this apartment, I have spent 20-30 hours (conservative estimate) looking for things that I couldn’t find because I never finished organizing my office (nor the office stuff that never made it into the office). The cost of organizing will probably be 10-15 hours of writing time. But the benefit will be 20-40 extra hours of writing time in the next six months because I won’t have to spend time digging through piles and boxes again.

Opportunity cost can feel double-edged – no matter what good you do with your time (writing, helping a friend), there is some other good you are not doing (spending time with family, doing taxes). And I feel a hundred times worse when I look back and realize I’ve made a poor choice, not even a halfway decent choice. (Because I watched two hours of TV on my lunch break, I now have to write or do taxes when John is home so I can’t spend time with him.) What is a person to do?

I find one of the best sources of wisdom to be the book of James in the Bible. James says trials and testing develop perseverance, which develops character. He says if anyone lacks wisdom, she should ask God who gives it generously to all. If we have faith, but don’t follow it up with work, our faith is pointless. So if I believe I’m good enough to be published but I don’t finish my manuscripts and send them out, my faith in my gifts is useless to me.

But James also encourages us to take a deep breath and remember we’re only human and we all stumble in many ways. He reminds us that bitter envy and selfish ambition do not help us succeed in any goal. He says wisdom that comes from heaven is pure, peace-loving, considerate and more. (You’ll find these in a good writer’s group.) He reminds us that we don’t even know how long our lives are or what will happen in them, so not to get hung up on set-in-concrete goals. We should just say, if God and life allow it, I will do this or that. He also encourages us to have patience, to remember that a farmer does a lot of work, and then does a lot of waiting while the crop grows.

And that is the rounded view of opportunity cost – we make goals, we count the cost, we ask for wisdom, we make decisions, we work hard, we remember we’re only human, and we accept that life may change our goals over time. When I keep this mind, I find my life more peaceful, joyful and productive. I hope it helps you, too.

Kitty Bucholtz is the co-founder of Routines for Writers, a web site dedicated to helping writers write more. She writes romance novels, light urban fantasy novels for adults and young adults, and magazine articles. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program at University of Technology, Sydney.